The human spirit is competitive. Since earliest times men and women have run and raced against each other. The basic race consists of a start where someone says “GO” and everyone races to the finish line—first one across wins. A stopwatch can be used to determine the winning time.
It is easy to spot the winners—they are at the front, but it is not so simple to determine who is say “400th”. Today, every runner wants to know how he or she did compared to other runners and to their “personal best” time. They want to know if they are “400th” or “401st”. To know that, an accurate, recorded time needs to be generated for every runner.
In a large race today, there are thousands of runners. Systems need to capture a start-time for every runner and to track when they cross the finish line, then use that data to compute that runner's elapsed time. In long races, runners also want to know what their “split times” are. They want to know what their times were when they crossed certain mile markers during the race. Further sophistication now requires that these times be posted on the internet in real time so that relatives and loved ones can use the runner's number to see when their runner passed these points.
The present invention meets that need with an improved UHF RFID timing tag on the runner's shoe and portable readers connected via the cellular network.
RFID has been used in race timing systems since 1986. Before the present invention, all of these systems used a returnable RFID chip that was attached to the runner and had to be returned to the timer following the race. These systems have significant limitations. First, the timer must build a cross-link file that correlates the unique RFID chip number to the runner's bib number. This process of building this file is time consuming and error prone. Second, after the race, each runner must wait in line to have his or her RFID chip “clipped” and returned to the timer. The event coordinator must ensure that there are sufficient volunteers to collect these RFID chips and there must be a sufficiently large and secure area to support this chip collection. If chips are not returned, the event is liable and must pay the timer for lost chips. In addition, the prior art chips are bulky and expensive to mail, so pre-registration options to improve race starts cost the event money—a not insignificant trade off. Further, the RFID controller on prior art systems is susceptible to electromagnetic interferences and must be tuned. Finally, the prior art chip controller does not have an integrated screen requiring this unit to operate externally with cables, more pieces, more packing and unpacking for the timer.
The present invention overcomes these limitations by providing a system that uses low cost, disposable UHF Gen 2 RFID Tags. The use of this tag eliminates the need for chip assignment, the cost of shipping chips to events or participants, lost chip costs and the need to create a secure zone for chip collection. The elimination of the costs for these processes directly affects the events' and timers' bottom lines. On race day, the timer can now benefit from a system that is over 99.8% accurate, does not have to be tuned, does not suffer from interference from spurious EMI sources, can be powered by its internal Li-ion batteries, external car batteries, AC generators and/or AC socket in the back of a vehicle.